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FRANK WAKELEY GUNSAULUS 
From portrait painted by Arvid N} r holm, of Chicago, and pre¬ 
sented to the University on behalf of the donors by Mr. O. A. 
Wright at Recognition Chapel, Commencement, 1920 . The Brown¬ 
ing students and others contributed to the expense of the portrait. 
The open volume upon which the hand of the sitter rests is a hand¬ 
made, hand-illuminated copy of the Declamations of Seneca, written 
about 1275 A. D. upon purest vellum, and presented to the University 
by Mr. Wright. It is on exhibition with the Gunsaulus collection 
of MSS. and early books in the University library. 









RECISELY one hundred and one years 
after the birth of Robert Browning, and 
almost fifty years after the death of his 
wife—that is, during- the first week of May, 
1913—there occurred by public sale in 
London the dispersal of their personal 
relics to the ends of the earth. Chairs, tables, ink-stands, 
photographs, busts, antiquities from Babylon and Greece, 




the hooks from their library, with the autograph of one or 
the other on fly-leaf or title-page, their letters and poems in 
priceless MSS., even the more sacredly intimate tokens like 
















Mrs. Browning’s watch and the still more precious souvenir 
which accompanied the Sonnet from the Portuguese, be¬ 
ginning: 

I never gave a lock of hair away 

To a man, Dearest, except this to thee— 

all fell under the ruthless hammer of the auctioneer . 1 A 
melancholy sight for the lovers of him who wrote One 
Word More, and her to whom the burning lines were ad¬ 
dressed. For many of the articles were purchased for sub¬ 
sequent barter and sale by “dealers and stealers,” 

Who, seeing mere money’s worth in their prize, 

Will sell it to somebody calm as Zeno 
At naked High Art, 

and thereby give a new meaning to the lines in which the 
poet expressed his indignation years ago, when they robbed 
him of a certain precious little tablet of Giotto’s which 
Michael Angelo himself once had coveted. 

The Gunsaulus Collection 

Others of these treasures, however, have fallen into 
more reverent hands; and some of them have been 
brought to America—very fittingly, since here both the 
Brownings, Robert in particular, found an earlier and 
more cordial audience than in England. And among 
Americans no more sympathetic and loving interpreter 
can be found than the Rev. Dr. Frank W. Gunsaulus, 
who from time to time has turned over to his alma mater 
a rich collection of Browning memorabilia that will be 
gratefully cherished by the students of Ohio Wesleyan 
as long as the poetry of the Brownings is read, and will 
enable the hundred and more who each year elect English 
six (the Tennyson-Browning course) to come into a 
more intimate personal relation with them. 

*See Introduction, by Sir Frederick G. Kenyon, to New Poems by 
Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1914 . 


Two 



Most conspicuous of all, the familiar face of the poet 
himself looks down over the great reading-room of the 
college library. Painted by Felix Moscheles, who sold 
it with the consent of the sitter directly to Dr. Gunsaulus, 
it is probably the last portrait of Robert Browning to be 
made, showing him as he was during the closing months 
of his life just before he left England for the final fateful 
visit to Italy. Here again is seen the masculine eye— 
almost leonine, the robust figure, the frank open counte¬ 
nance with little mark of old age upon it, except in the 
whitening of the crisply curling hair and beard, the kind¬ 
ly human smile of the poet to whom “the world was full 
of vague possibilities of friendship.” And in the cabinet 
near by, in his own hand-writing, are some verses he 
made for the artist, to describe his picture The Isle’s 
Enchantress. 

Various fields of Robert Browning’s interest are here 
significantly represented—the Shelleyan influence, for 
example, by a first edition of Queen Mab. This is 
the poem, though not the identical volume, which he, a 
boy of sixteen, found one day in a boxful of second-hand 
books on a street stall, and which at once became for 
him, as he says, “a key to a new world.” There is also 
a small copy of Zastrozzi; and a beautiful little text, 
printed in 1826—two years before the adventure alluded 
to—which contains many of the shorter poems of Shelley 
that he read with such ravishment one warm night in 
May in his father’s garden, while the nightingales were 
singing in the laburnum “heavy with its weight of gold,” 
and in the high branches of a copper-beech near by. 
These volumes, to be sure, were never in his hands, but 
they appropriately find a place in the collection on ac¬ 
count of his life-long enthusiasm for the creator of Alas- 
tor and Prometheus Unbound. 

Other articles there are of a rare antiquarian interest, 
which came directly from his home in London—ancient 


Three 


pieces of pottery from Egypt, Assyria and Greece; a jar 
from Babylonia, from the pantry of the King’s palace, 
partly melted by the heat of the great conflagration that 
marked the ravage and destruction of the city. Who shall 
tell what figures peopled the poets brain, as his gaze 
rested upon these fragments of far-off times, what shock 
of battle reached his ears, shouting and tumult of cap¬ 
tains and men-at-arms, and 

the great march 

Wherein man runs' to man to assist him and buttress an arch 
Nought can break? 



And here, most beautiful of all, is a delicate little head in 
marble, atilt like a flower on its stalk, now scarred and 
stained by the yellow clay in which for centuries it lay 
buried—what visions it must have raised before his eyes 


Four 







of Greece, of another Balaustion perhaps who should in¬ 
terpret not a new Alkestis, but it may be a new Agamem¬ 
non : -ti 

that king, 

Treacling the purple., calmly to his death, 

While round him, like the clouds of eve, all dusk 
1 he giant shades of fate, silently flitting, 

Pile the dim outline of the coming doom. 

A more recent addition to the collection is a set of four, 
oaken chairs and a settee, upholstered in crimson velvet 
with broad bands of gold braid—Italian in style—which 
the poet’s son remembered as once having been part of 
the furniture of his early home in Florence. It is pleas¬ 
ant to dream dreams about them ; to think of them as 
they stood in Casa (midi with the old tapestries and satin 
from cardinals’ bedsteads that had been picked up here 
and there in the dusty shops, the bookcase with the 
carved faces of angels and demons that a neighboring- 
convent yielded, and the cream-colored slab of agate 

'Neath the twin cherubs ill the tarnished frame 
O’ the mirror, 

on which Browning leaned that hot night as he read and 
read again the little yellow book that gave him the story 
of Pompilia, and in imagination the whole grim tragedy 
played itself out in Rome and Arezzo. Perhaps, although 
they do not appear in the picture Browning had made 
after Mrs. Browning’s death, their place was in the big 
drawing-room that opened out upon the terrace and 
looked toward the old gray church of Santa Felice across 
the way. Her room this was, of which he said there was 
not an inch without a memory for him; here she always 
sat. working by the little table, or reading, or talking to 
her visitors, while the old pictures of the saints looked 
down sadly from their carved black frames—pictures 
that he had discovered in obscure and out-of-the-way 


Five 


places and described in association with the names of 
Cimabue, Giottino and Ghirlandaio in Old Pictures in 
Florence. How their crimson and gold must have bright¬ 
ened the dark shadows of the dim chamber, and caught 
up the subdued lights against the brown background of 
the hangings on the walls! Was it from one of them, one 
wonders, that her husband watched her sit 

Reading by fire-light, that great brow 

And the spirit-small hand propping it, 

when each answered the other's unspoken thought by the 
fine tact of their love? And when friends dropped in of 
an evening, what a revel of talk and laughter there must 
have been, over the hot chestnuts and mulled wine, he 
always loud and vivacious, pouring out a torrent of 
bubbling speech, his talk “assuming the volume and 
tumult of a cascade,” and she speaking rarely in a gentle 
voice that “often fluttered over her words like the flame 
of a dying candle over the wick.” Perhaps in these very 
chairs Mary Boyle has sat, who counted four poets among 
her intimate circle, and Hawthorne, and the two young 
American sculptors—Powers and Story—and that other 
young American, George William Curtis, then fresh from 
Brook Farm, where, it is said, even “the weeds were 
scratched out of the ground to the music of Tennyson and 
Browning.” And it may well be that on the broad seat 
of one of them Walter Savage Landor found repose, 
when, past eighty, after a violent quarrel with his family, 
he appeared alone at Casa Guidi, homeless and ill, with 
nothing but the clothes he wore and a few pauls in one 
of his pockets. At all events, the Brownings sheltered 
and befriended him ; and in gratitude he gave them on a 
wedding anniversary a Berlin Trembleuse cup and saucer, 
made expressly for them, which is now also a part of the 
collection. 


Six 


The Books of the Brownings 

And some of their books are here, too; books they 
lovingly handled together, enriched with penciled no¬ 
tations that show the range of her scholarship and the 
depth of her critical insight. Here is a Sophocles in two 
volumes, and a sumptuous Plato in eleven. Both seem to 
have belonged to her before her marriage, although in 



nearly every volume of the Plato she has inscribed with 
wifely pride, in her tiny hand, “Roberti et Elizabethae 
B. Barrett Browning,” adding ex libris in one or two. 
Greek was a life-long passion with them both, as it was 
one of their earliest points of sympathy—Greek and 
poetry! “I love your verses with all my heart,” he 
writes impetuously at the beginning of their correspon¬ 
dence ; and she, in the first of her letters in which his name 
appears, observes that “Mr. Browning is said to be learned 
in Greek, especially the dramatists.” As for her, it is told 
that when she fell ill, she had her Greek books bound to 
look like novels, for fear that her physician should forbid 
her use of them. The Plato at least, though in the orig- 


Seven 













inal binding, seems to have been often in her hands dur¬ 
ing the three years of her sojourn on the Devon coast, 
where she hoped the warmer climate might aid in restor¬ 
ing her health ; for we find, according to her own nota¬ 
tion, that she had read the Theaetetus by December 23, 
1838, the Parmenides by the first of January following, 
and Beta of the Laws—over the title of which she has 
written, “ ’Tis good to be merry and wise’’—at Torquay 
by the fifteenth of February, 1840. The Symposium, of 
which she left a page of her translation in writing be¬ 
tween the leaves of the book, she finds "highly dramatic, 
. . . the whole composition remarkable for passages, 
deep-toned and imaginative. The passage referring'to 
the chief beauty” she thinks "one of the very noblest in 
Plato.” But the death of her best beloved brother, who 
was drowned in Babbacombe Bay on a day of the next 
July, broke the continuity of her studies, and there is no 
further record in the volumes to show when she resumed 
her readings, or the order in which she pursued them. It 
is not unlikely, however, that when she plunged again 
into "work, work, work,” as her only solace, she may have 
found consolation in the noble words of Socrates on death 
and immortality, and have read them in the days of her 
deepest sorrow, with a new sense of their meaning. Thus 
endeared to her, one thinks these volumes must surely 
have been among the treasures, the old favorites, for 
which the two sent to London when they had established 
themselves in. Casa Guidi, and were eager to fill the 
empty shelves of the convent book case. And when the 
books finally came, is it an altogether idle fancy that 
one of them may have lain on the poet’s knee that eve¬ 
ning, when, as he pondered over its pages, he prophet¬ 
ically dreamed that one day in life’s November it should 
put 

Such a branch-work forth as soon extends 

To a vista opening far and wide, 

Eight 


that slopes at last to Italy and youth and happy retro¬ 
spects? 

Two very interesting additions have more recently 
been made to the collection. One is another of Mrs. 
Browning’s books, a superb text in Greek and Latin of 



De Sublimate bearing the name of Dionysius Longinus, 
with many marginal notes in her own hand, and on the 
back of the frontispiece her critical estimate of the work 
signed with her initials. “I am doubting whether to 
call him the poet or the philosopher of criticism,” she re- 


Nine 









marks,—a judgment that later authorities confirm. The 
other is a duodecimo in old calf, La Libraria del Doni 
Fiorentino, an anthology of Florentine literature in two 
volumes bound together and dated respectively 1580 and 
1551. This belonged to Robert Browning and testifies to 
his interest in rare old books. On the fly-leaf in his own 
hand is written, ‘‘This work is so scarce that I have seen 
the first part only marked in a catalogue one guinea.” 

And there is the beautiful bronze bust of Pompilia, the 
conception and handiwork of the artist son of the two 
poets, which stood for many years in the house in Lon¬ 
don, cherished and admired by the author of The Ring 
and the Book. But it is not the Pompilia of the poem : 
the full half-open lips, the softly rounded cheeks, the sen¬ 
suous chin, the heavy mass of hair flowing down over the 
low forehead, these are not the features of that ladv, 
“young, tall, beautiful, sad and strange” as Caponsacchi 
saw her on that eventful night at the theatre, the woman 
“with the great, grave, griefful air” who appeared to him 
in the twilight with lamp in hand, framed in the black 
square of the window and asked him to take her to Rome. 

Her brow had not the right line, leaned too much, 

Painters would say; they like the straight-up Greek: 

This seemed bent somewhat with an invisible crown 
Of martyr and saint, not such as art approves. 

And how the dark orbs dwelt deep underneath, 

Looked out of such a sad sweet heaven on me— 

The lips compressed a little, came forward too, 

Careful for a whole world of sin and pain. 

No, it is not the Pompilia of the poem; but it is very beau¬ 
tiful nevertheless and very precious in its associations! 

There are other relics here that cannot even be enum¬ 
erated; first editions of the Browning poetry, books of 
criticism and personalia, and a few autograph letters. Of 
the latter, one reproduced in fac simile in Dr. Gunsaulus’s 
own delightful volume, Higher Ministrations of Recent 


English Poetry, is a note of condolence written by 
Browning in 1864, which strikes the same vibrant chord 
of courage and faith he had struck three years before in 
Prospice, in the midst of his own great sorrow: ‘‘We all 
believe, I know, that in a short time we shall be together 
again, and that this life would be poor indeed but for this 
hope.” Another was written in 1853, by George Fred¬ 
eric Watts to his “dear master and teacher.” And the 
last, even more significant, was written from The Priory 
in May, 1869, by the hand of George Eliot herself. “I saw 
a private letter from a very young woman,” she says, 
“whose words are all alive with sincere meaning. In 
this letter she has occasion to refer to ‘the works of the 
poet from whom I have sucked most life—Robert Brown¬ 
ing.’ I venture to tell you this precisely because it was 
not intended for your eyes and ears.” “The poet from 
whom I have sucked most life—Robert Browning”—there 
is the common verdict which thousands of young men 
and women, both in his own time and ours, have found 
inscribed on their hearts! W. E. S. 

Delaware, O. 


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